


Sensory

by Siria



Category: Farscape
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-03
Updated: 2007-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-03 22:44:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She drew her first breath onboard a Leviathan, breathing in air that was always a little too stale, a little too cold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sensory

**Author's Note:**

> For Jenn.

_gustatory_

She drew her first breath onboard a Leviathan, breathing in air that was always a little too stale, a little too cold. Her eyes were trained to no horizon, only to the vastness of space, and the gravity her body knows is artificial, born of time spent orbiting a hundred different suns. She lives in the sky, and the stars beyond it, and calls no planet home—all of this she knows—and yet when she licks at the nape of John's neck, she tastes afternoons of carefully hoarded sunshine, the sweet taste of soil where green things grow, and all of it is blessedly familiar, all of it is like home.

_tactile_

All Peacekeepers are soldiers. It doesn't matter whether an aging officer behind a desk or an eager young conscript, Prowler pilot or research scientist, there is something which sets them apart from civilians, marks them out as military born and bred—the set of their shoulders, the line of their mouth, the way they carry themselves, as if always anticipating attack. As if they are contained. John is not a Peacekeeper, not a soldier, not anything she has ever known before—he reaches out to her, pulls her into his orbit, his space. A touch to her cheek, her shoulder; a palm that runs the length of her arm. He doesn't hold himself back, and she leans against him as he strokes her hair; the newly formed gun calluses on his fingers catch against the strands, and she shivers.

_olfactory_

She doesn't know what to think the first time she realises that she settles herself more firmly into his arms afterwards just so she can smell this—fresh sweat and the aftermath of sex; the particular ozone scent of him that seems to live behind his ears, in the hollow of his throat; the clean scent of his hair. She doesn't know what to think, but she doesn't pull away.

 

_visual_

She's trained to assess a room on entering, had it drilled into her over and over as a child so that it's unconscious now—second nature to know the risks, the escape routes, the weapons, the advantages. Somewhere, somehow, she added to that training herself, notices where John is, too—trained to notice where he sits, where he stands, where he sleeps. To know where he directs his smile, that wide open and generous curve; to know all that, and to know she's smiling back.

_auditory_

Like everyone else in her year group, she was injected with the translator microbes as a toddler, as soon as she had grasped basic Sebacean. Delvian, Luxan, Hynerian, Human—all of it sounds the same to her now, and has since before she even knew there should be a difference. John sounds just like her when he speaks—a lot less sane, sure, and there are plenty of times when he uses words that just defy translation—but the rolling vowels are what her ears expect, the short clicks of frustration and punctuation, the swift rhyming phrases of Sebacean slang. It frustrates her in a way she's not used to, this longing she has for the microbes to malfunction, for her not to know what he's saying at all—so that she can hear just what he sounds like when he murmurs "baby, baby" against her shoulder, when he invokes deities when she climbs on top of him, when he says "I love you" like the very phrase is a wonder to him—she wishes she could hear him, and be sure of what he really means.


End file.
